Douglas Osheroff

Origins and early life

Douglas Dean Osheroff was born on 1 August 1945 in Aberdeen, a logging town on the coast of Washington State, the second of five children of a doctor, William Osheroff, and of a nurse, Bessie Anne Ondov. His father was the son of Jewish immigrants who had left Russia shortly after the turn of the century and, in his son's words, an atheistic Jew, while his mother was the daughter of a Lutheran minister whose parents came from what is now Slovakia.

He grew up in the Lutheran church, as he told the Smithsonian's Nobel Voices project in 2000, and later stopped going; his place in this directory is by descent, through his father's Jewish family.

Work and career

As a boy he took his toys apart for their electric motors, and in his last year of high school he built a 100-kilovolt X-ray machine before going to Caltech, where he heard Richard Feynman's lectures and graduated in 1967. A graduate student in David Lee's low-temperature laboratory at Cornell, working with Lee and Robert Richardson, he noticed in November 1971 small, unexplained jumps in the pressure of his helium-3 cell, a few thousandths of a degree above absolute zero.

Further measurements in 1972 showed them to be phase transitions in the liquid: helium-3 had become a superfluid, flowing without friction. He then spent fifteen years at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, mapping the new superfluid phases and the magnetic order of solid helium-3, before moving in 1987 to Stanford, where he chaired the physics department from 1993 to 1996.

Recognition

In 1996 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Lee and Richardson, a third each, for their discovery of superfluidity in helium-3, and on the day the news came he still taught his class on the physics of photography. In March 2003 he was named to the board that investigated the loss of the space shuttle Columbia.